Commission for Culture and Olympic Education

Various activities contribute to raising awareness about the importance of culture and Olympic education.

Accessible projects

The IOC supports various activities in order to develop the link between sport and culture in all its forms, encourages cultural exchange and promotes the diversity of cultures.The Olympic Museum is a living testimony of the interaction between these two worlds.

Olympic Museum

Sport, art and culture are the traditional pillars of Olympsim, and The Museum gives concrete form to this trinity.

The mission of The Olympic Museum is to make visitors aware of the breadth and the importance of the Olympic Movement; to show them by means of images and symbols that Olympism is not merely a matter of sports competition, but rather a philosophy of life whose roots are deeply embedded in our history.

With this in mind, The Olympic Museum reserves a special place for its young visitors. Special programmes encouraging the discovery of Olympism and the Games are organised to meet the expectations of children, adolescents, schools or other groups of young people. These include themed tours of both permanent and temporary exhibitions, discovery activities, educational materials and more.

The Museum is a centre for for study that bears witness to the Olympic Games and their role in modern society. In addition, it is the universal home of the written, visual and graphic memory of the Olympic Games.

Cooperation with Olympic Solidarity

Olympic Solidarity promotes culture and education by encouraging NOCs and their National Olympic Academy (NOA) to be actively involved in this field by creating, organising and publicising related programmes and initiatives.

It contributes to the IOC activities implemented via the Department of International Cooperation and Development by financially helping certain NOCs wishing to send delegates to the IOC World Forum on Education, Culture and Sport. It also assists NOCs with the organisational costs at a national level of participating in the Olympic Sport and Literature contest and the Olympic Art and Sport contest.

The programme also helps NOCs to set up and carry out individual initiatives on a national basis, by means of programmes and/or specific activities such as the creation of NOAs, establishment of Olympic education programmes in schools and universities, assistance for exhibitions or other cultural activities linked to sport.

Cooperation with the International Pierre de Coubertin Committee (IPCC)

The aim of the International Pierre de Coubertin Committee (IPCC) is to make known as widely as possible the work of the reviver of the Olympic Games and perpetuate his memory all over the world. The IPCC is an association composed of people who wish to pursue this aim and who have themselves often contributed directly to doing so through their writings or actions within the Olympic Movement, either nationally or internationally.

The IPCC and its members thus contributed to the publication of a Coubertin bibliography in 1991, and of his main texts (three volumes in French published in 1986), with translations in English (published in 2000) and Spanish (2006).

The IPCC was founded on 19 January 1975 in Lausanne, and was recognised by the IOC in 1978. Its first Chairman was the Swiss doctor, Paul Martin, Olympic 800m silver medallist at the 1924 Games in Paris. Geoffroy de Navacelle de Coubertin, a great-nephew of Pierre de Coubertin, succeeded him and headed the IPCC for more than 12 years. The current IPCC Chairman is the German professor Norbert Muller, a leading specialist on Coubertin's work.

The IPCC recognises the national Pierre de Coubertin committees which pursue the same aims at national level. The oldest one is the French Pierre de Coubertin Committee (founded in 1960), while the most recent is the Mauritius Pierre de Coubertin Committee (founded in 2005).

The IPCC regularly organises:

- Scientific congresses, including the one entitled "The Relevance of Pierre de Coubertin Today", held in Lausanne in 1986, and "Coubertin and Olympism: questions for the future", held in 1997 to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Olympic Congress in Le Havre;- Exhibitions, such as "Coubertin and the Greek Miracle" presented in Athens during the summer of 2004 or the mobile exhibition "The life and work of Pierre de Coubertin", which is available in six languages;- Youth forums, which bring together for a week at a time classes from Pierre de Coubertin schools around the world, held in Le Havre (FRA) in 1997, Much Wenlock (GBR) in 1999, Lausanne (SUI) in 2001, Genoa (ITA) in 2003, and Radstadt (AUT) in 2005; and- Coubertin days as part of the youth camps held during the Olympic Summer Games, notably in Atlanta, in 1996, Sydney, in 2000, and Athens, in 2004.

Education through sport

IOC World Conference on Sport, Education and CultureThe 8th edition of the IOC World Conference on Sport, Education and Culture will join the line-up of key international events in 2012 such as the first ever Winter Youth Olympic Games in Innsbruck, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) Rio +20, and the Games of the XXX Olympiad in London, providing the perfect close to an Olympic year.

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27 November 2012Olympians discuss entourage and dual careerSeveral Olympic athletes joined in yesterday’s discussions at the 8th IOC World Conference on Sport, Education and Culture, which is currently taking place in Amsterdam (Netherlands).